SPARK ✩ CORIOLANUS SNOW.¹

𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞.

          Jude was taken to a small, unused meeting room inside the Justice Building after the Ceremony was completed. Around him were unlit monitors, blackened projectors and their screens, and dusty bookshelves. A long table stretched in the center of the room, all of the chairs stacked upside down on its top. The air was crisp and buzzing from the fan spinning above him, stirring the dust and smell of ancient paper all around like insects. 

Resisting the urge to pace, he propped himself up on the corner of the table. These were the parts of the Hunger Games that people like him were the most unfamiliar with -- the waiting. Everyone knew that the tributes were courted off, but where? Where would he be taken after this? This moment here was already a surprise, this pause in a time when his adrenaline was skyrocketing. 

Behind him, closed windows blocked out any sunlight besides shattered pieces of sunlight through the blinds. Jude thought he was going to suffocate in these tiny four walls, surrounded by technology smart enough to save him if he could only use it. It was laughable how advanced the Capitol got while they made sure to leave them all in the dust. Except District 3, he supposed, with them being the true masterminds of it all -- but even then, once the inventions were out of their hands, so was their rights and their access to it. 

How many things in this room did they make? In the Hunger Games he would partake did they make? How many weapons in the Games did his father make? 

His father. His defensive, impulsive father, who was now as locked up as Jude. They always were more similar than the other half of their family. Did he know, like Jude did, that his son was under lock and key, too? 

Jude's fingers pulsed into a fist. Flexed in, flexed out. He needed to hit something. His ears still rang in shock and horror and such violent, abhorrent rage. He was not a child but in that arena he was, he knew it had to be true. Based on the statistics he compared his own likelihood to, there was no chance that anyone else was as young as he was. They couldn't be. He was so aggressively an outlier that he might as well have been on the cliffside of Panem, hanging off the edge by his fingernails. 

Teeth gritting together, he forced himself to stand. To cross to the door, and to bang on it with his closed fist. (He'd closed it now, harder this time than the times before. His palms were stinging from the pinch of his nails, but it was grounding him, and that had to count for something.) "Is someone going to fucking do something?" 

Bang, bang, bang. Silence. Minutes were starting to feel like hours, or perhaps they were hours. There was no clock to tell, thankfully -- the ticking would have driven him mad, and its face would have been shattered onto the scratchy dark carpet long before he'd reached this breaking point. 

At times like this, Jude wished they did have more insight onto this part of the Hunger Games. Did the previous games have a waiting room like this? Did they hold them like patients waiting for an exam? Or, had the other tributes gone through the same thing? If he knew, he would have felt more reassured, but the uncertainty was crawling up his spine like an out-of-reach spider. 

Jude's lungs felt tight as his breath began to grow rapid. "Fuck it." He hit the door once more, a punctuation mark and a warning all at once, and spun on his heel. With only an exhale's worth of hesitation, he grabbed the nearest projection monitor with both of his hands and ripped it from its place at the far end of the long table, and hurled it with every ounce of his strength at the wall.

Two screens still hung on the wall, one on each side of where the first and largest used to be. 

The projector itself was still in the back of the room, propped on a polished wooden desk. 

The bookshelves stacked with tomes infested with dust and booklice still held their places, marked by the outline of dust surrounding them. 

But not for long.